Meet The Disruptors: Arun Pattabhiraman Of Sprinklr On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
You start building out your growth, brand, and product marketing engines with subject matter experts and start driving more accountability across brand and revenue enablement functions.
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Arun Pattabhiraman is Sprinklr’s Chief Marketing Officer.
Prior to joining Sprinklr, Arun was Chief Growth Officer at Freshworks, where he led a global team of 400+ marketing, operations, and sales development professionals and played a critical role in helping Freshworks become the first Indian B2B SaaS company to list on NASDAQ in September 2021.
Prior to Freshworks, Arun ran global marketing at Disney+Hotstar, and also served as the CMO at InMobi, India’s first unicorn. Arun holds a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from Anna University and a Post Graduate Program in Management from the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
I didn’t always know I wanted to have a career in marketing. I actually started studying electrical engineering for my bachelor’s degree. But, I come from a family of musicians and artists, so creativity has always been in my blood. My dad is an English and Tamil poet. He used to be a writer in Ananda Vikatan, one of the oldest Tamil weekly magazines. He’s also a pencil portrait artist. My mom is a Carnatic musician. And my grandmother used to sing on All India Radio, the national public radio broadcaster of India.
Even though engineering was my major, creative activities filled up my free time. I sang music for a band, and loved creating pencil sketches. Towards the end of college, I realized that engineering wasn’t my passion, and that I needed a balance of art and science in my life. I shifted my career path and decided to get an MBA.
After my MBA, I spent three years at the telecom company Airtel before moving to the mobile advertising tech company InMobi. I joined InMobi during its early years and helped the company grow rapidly, which led to me assuming the role of global CMO. After nearly 7 years I moved on and soon joined Freshworks as the Chief Growth Officer, where I built several functions from scratch and played a critical role in helping Freshworks become the first Indian B2B SaaS company to list on NASDAQ in September 2021.
In early 2022 I was looking for my next challenge, and had an opportunity to join Sprinklr as Chief Marketing Officer. Sprinklr went public in 2021, and has tremendous growth potential as a B2B software company that helps the world’s most valuable brands break down internal silos in order to deliver seamless customer experiences on social media and messaging channels.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
Tackling the challenge of making marketing a predictable, profitable area of growth for the business is something I’m focused on right now. Building a brand requires creativity, but translating that into a profitable area of growth for a business is tricky and requires analytical skills to predict where a business could land. It’s a complex science, and very difficult to strike a balance between brand-led growth and sales-led growth.
As companies transition from selling to SMBs to targeting mid market and enterprise companies, the sales motion typically moves from inbound to outbound. While most small and medium buyers can be attracted using inbound marketing techniques such as digital and content marketing, mid-market and enterprise customers need outbound sales.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
I don’t think marketing leaders can come into a role with a standard disruptive playbook. And it’s actually a negative thing when people go into a role wanting to “disrupt” without deeply understanding the company. If the stage of company and market strategy is not aligned, disruption is not good.
Even the most astute leaders can’t figure out the transformation required before they understand the stage the company is at and where the company is on its growth journey.
There are four to five stages as a company goes from seed to scale. The first stage is what I like to call the growth stage. These are the early years of the company where marketing teams are largely focused on driving acquisitions.
The second stage is really brand establishment. Once you have product-market fit, you have a better understanding of what the value proposition is, and you are in a better position to define what your brand essence is.
Third stage is scaling and specialization. You start building out your growth, brand, and product marketing engines with subject matter experts and start driving more accountability across brand and revenue enablement functions.
Fourth or fifth stage is when your brand is well established and you can invest in customer marketing, driving cross-sell and upsell programs, and even referrals as a new acquisition channel.
For many companies, creating this sustainable growth playbook is incredibly disruptive if the company doesn’t have it in place.
Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
As a data-driven marketer, leaders want data all the time to make decisions. But, over a period of time, I’ve realized that the collective experiences in life always provide you with information you shouldn’t discount. When I look back at decisions I’ve made — sometimes moving sideways in my career instead of up — I knew that if I pursued my passion and stayed true to myself I would end up where I needed to be.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
I haven’t executed a massive rebrand yet, and I’ve always wanted to architect this, but I want to do it when there is a real need.
Predictions for 2023?
I think there is a movement against lead generation towards demand generation and capture. Every B2B company is so used to gated content that we’ve lost touch with the true art of creating demand. What about creating demand rather than just capturing demand?
There is a growing realization in the B2B space that there is a lot of value that gets added to things you do that can’t necessarily be measured precisely. On the other hand, we have tools like Sprinklr that are helping brands get much better at measuring the value of social and PR, and showing how it impacts the brand.
Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?
I’m not someone who reads many business books. I’m always interested in stories of people who have gone down different paths. For example, I love the Autobiography of a Yogi about Paramahansa Yogananda, because it’s an interesting look at the science of Yoga and the tradition of meditation — something that gets me out of my daily B2B marketing world.
How can our readers follow you online?
- LinkedIn: https://in.linkedin.com/in/arunpattabhiraman
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/arun_pattabhi
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Meet The Disruptors: Arun Pattabhiraman Of Sprinklr On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
